As we enter a tighter labor market, your organization needs every advantage to hire and retain top talent. Studies show that a thorough and up-to-date onboarding strategy has a strong correlation with higher employee engagement, increased employee connection, better performance, and lower attrition. And it all starts with a new hire survey.
What is a new hire survey?
Whether it’s called an onboarding survey, a new-hire survey, or just an employee survey, at their core, they all simply measure the experience for employees and help leaders improve the onboarding and new-hire process.
Onboarding surveys help your team gauge the process of recruiting, hiring, and starting of a new role at your organization. A good employee survey checks your process from when a prospective hire first heard about the job opening, to applying, interviewing, and then following up in the weeks and months after they start.
Why are onboarding surveys important?
While it varies per role, the average cost of hiring an employee is around $4,000. Hiring a new employee involves multiple resources across the recruiting, interviewing, onboarding, and training stages.
Employee onboarding is a critical stage in the employee lifecycle and sets the foundation for how successful new hires are likely to be in your organization. A great onboarding experience will help employees adjust to their new roles so they can quickly deliver valuable work and thrive in their new environment.
A good employee survey will give you valuable information about how well your recruitment strategy is working, as well as making employees feel like they belong.
But don’t take our word for it. According to the Harvard Business Review,
Nearly 33% of new hires look for a new job within their first six months on the job. (Among Millennials, that percentage is even higher … and it happens earlier.)
As the adage goes, you only get one shot at a first impression and onboarding surveys are your opportunity to gauge how your first impression looks. New hires who experience poorly planned and executed onboarding and inductions may prematurely decide that the organization is badly managed and that they’ve made a mistake. Such conclusions are a costly waste of time for everyone.
Onboarding surveys best practices
Like any good employee survey, the onboarding surveys won’t just be written once and rolled out for years to come. All good employee surveys will continually evolve as the needs of the business, and its people, change over time.
A good onboarding survey will be sent at particular milestones during the onboarding process. This could be after the initial training session or you could choose to send them after a set time, say a week or month after starting in the role.
The aim of their feedback is to identify the effectiveness of your program. Regular or frequent check-ins help your organization quickly adapt and help you gauge the effectiveness over time. Understanding this data and how it impacts the rest of the employee lifecycle is a key part of prioritizing your initiatives in HR.
What kind of onboarding questions should you be asking (and why)?
There’s no one-size-fits-all when it comes to your employee surveys. They should be tailored to your individual industry, challenges, and processes. But here are 10 general questions you can use:
- Overall, how well do you understand your role, including the responsibilities of your job?
- How accurately was your role described to you during your interviews (i.e., Are you doing what you expected you’d be doing)?
- How challenging would you say your current role is?
- How interested are you in your current role?
- How well do you know how to complete your work assignments?
- How satisfied or dissatisfied are you with the training that you have received for your new role?
- Considering all of the people that you’ll be working with in your role, how many would you say that you’ve met?
- How happy or unhappy are you with this company as a place to work?
- How relevant have your role-based conversations been with your manager?
- How relevant have your career-oriented conversations been with your manager?
Your goal in designing the survey should be to understand:
- How engaged and invested is the employee?
- How well have they integrated into the company?
- Are they fulfilling their obligations and roles/responsibilities?
- How likely is your employee to stay?
Reviewing survey results
After you’ve surveyed your employees it’s time to review your feedback. It’s important to have an open mind when looking at the results. Employees who are giving feedback that you weren’t expecting (i.e. negative comments) should not be met with pushback. Employees who did not have a good onboarding experience, just mean there may be a disconnect between what you think you are doing and what is being received.
Having administered hundreds of thousands of surveys and responses, PassPoint finds that the number one thing employees want is to know their feedback is being heard. If your new employees are going to take the time to answer your survey, you want them to know it’s worth their time.
In addition, by connecting your onboarding feedback with other feedback across the employee lifecycle, you’re able to make connections between the onboarding experience and other key lifecycle events from development and engagement all the way through to attrition. This is an essential step in proving the impact and value of your onboarding process as well as modeling the impact of any improvements you put in place.
All companies should be measuring their ability to properly give new employees an outstanding experience. If you are interested in administering your own surveys and collecting feedback, we’d be happy to discuss PassPoint’s A.I.-driven HR chatbot that can simplify the entire process. Book a demo today and let’s chat.